Seal is a wood-engraving created in 1941 by American printmaker Paul Landacre. It is pencil signed in the lower right and the reference is Wien 252. Seal was printed by the artist on an ivory laid Kitikata paper and the image measures 2-5/8 x 3-7/8 inches.
Seal was created as an illustration for Donald Culross Peattie’s The Road of a Naturalist which was published in London by Robert Hale in 1946. According to Jake Wien, this is the only known signed proof. This impression comes through inheritance of an old San Francisco family who were friends of Landacre.
Paul Landacre was born on 9 July 1893 in Columbus, Ohio and attended Ohio State University until he was suddenly crippled by a debilitating illness. In 1916, he moved to Chula Vista, California to convalesce and he found solace in drawing the landscape and purchased his first linoleum blocks. He moved to Los Angeles in 1922 to attend classes at the Otis Art Institute. Woodengraving was not part of the curriculum so he was self-taught. He worked as a commercial illustrator, married Margaret McCreery in 1925, and devoted himself to woodengraving in 1926.
He taught at the University of Southern California, the Otis Art Institute and the Kahn Institute and was a member of and exhibited with the California Society of Etchers, the California Print Makers Society, the American Society of Wood Engravers, and the American Society of Etchers. Landacre became the pre-eminent American woodengraver, an honor bestowed by Rockwell Kent and Carl Zigrosser. His mastery of the medium led to his election to the National Academy of Design in 1946. Landacre illustrated award winning books of poems and his first solo book, California Hills and other Woodengravings of 1931 won Fifty Books of the Year.
Paul Landacre’s work is represented in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Los Angeles Public Library, California; the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee; the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Oakland Museum of California Art; the Philadelphia Museum, Pennsylvania; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; and the Library of Congress and the National Museum, Washington, D.C.
Landacre’s nineteenth century Washington Hand Press is now in the collection of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California and his archive is in the collection of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, California.
Paul Landacre died in Los Angeles, California on 1 June 1963. His hillside home is a designated historic landmark.
